


Da Capo al Coda

by airdeari



Series: Orchestra AUs (multi-fandom) [1]
Category: Zero Escape (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Orchestra, F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-05
Updated: 2017-02-05
Packaged: 2018-09-22 03:30:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9580769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/airdeari/pseuds/airdeari
Summary: The brief goings-on of a campus-wide symphony orchestra with all of your favorite Zero Escape friends being thoroughly mediocre at classical music.





	

Out of the mere three-dozen-odd students in the campus-wide open orchestra, eight of them were members of four sets of twins. There were Nona and Ennea, the identical twins heading the second violins; Delta and Phi, the concertmaster and the so-called percussion master respectively; Sigma and Kyle, the timpanist (known to Phi as “percussion underling”) and a sweet boy playing French horn who always got blamed for damaging the timpani heads; and Diana and Luna, the redheads on cello and bassoon. It was likely for this very reason that former conductor of the ensemble Gentarou Hongou announced that he would no longer be leading the group next semester. He could not take it anymore.

Sure, they went through the whole song and dance at the winter concert where Diana gave a speech about how much everyone loved having him as a conductor and presented him with the gift they all pooled together to buy, but no one was really sad to see him go.

At the spring semester’s first rehearsal, Carlos did the same thing he always did with the trumpets, where he faced them all and held out his Trumpet I music, asking, “Anybody wanna switch seats?”

Aoi snorted and took his seat in front of the Trumpet II part. “No thanks. Keep wailin’ those high notes, dude.”

To their left they heard the sloppy sound of Junpei’s middle school level embouchure entertaining his trombone with the notion of warming up. In front of them, Kyle was cleanly alternating octaves on his horn, climbing up the scale in half-steps.

Her reed in her mouth, Akane looked at the empty chair in front of her, to Eric’s left, as she twisted the mouthpiece onto her clarinet. “Ith Alith gonna mith the firtht rehearthal?” she sighed.

Alice had played first oboe every semester since her freshman year, but she was rarely around to give the tuning note. The freshman concertmaster, Delta, had not yet learned who was really in charge of this orchestra. She was easily the most virtuosic musician in the whole ensemble. Hongou had tried many times to recruit her to the audition-only ensemble for music majors, where she would have also been the first oboe, but that would have required her to maintain the pretense of attending three rehearsals a week instead of just one. She was too busy double-majoring in mathematics and physics (and, according to Aoi, minoring in _hardcore partying_ ) to spend more than one and a half hours a week in rehearsals, if even that much.

“It makes a lot of sense for her to miss the first rehearsal,” replied Sean, scooting his chair closer to his music stand. “Everyone’s just sight-reading the music. It’s probably a waste of her time.”

Sean was one of a few homeschooled kids in the area that had been invited to play in the orchestra, more for their ability to play unusual instruments than for their talent. They basically begged Sean to join as soon as they discovered he had his own bass clarinet. He had to stack two chairs on top of each other to get to the right height to play it while sitting down, but the winds sounded so much better with him supporting the bottom register.

The other homeschooled kid, now a friend of Sean’s, played viola. There were about three violas in the whole orchestra, even including Quark.

“It’s ’cuz no one likes that clef. Who even reads that clef,” Junpei complained. “The lower-down tenor clef. Weirdos.”

“Alto clef is—tenor clef is raised-up alto clef!” Quark protested. “It’s the other way around!”

For some reason, the trombone player always found his way to the front of the orchestra to make small talk with the small violist. It was by witnessing those little interactions from her seat in the winds section that Akane first felt something special for Junpei.

“Seriously? _That_ Junpei?” Aoi groaned when she mentioned it to him. “Fart-mouth trombone-hands? _Him_?”

“You know you’re intrinsically prejudiced against trombone players because you play trumpet,” Akane said.

“Okay, brass hierarchy like this,” Aoi said, holding out his hands to show positions in the air. “Trumpets on top. King. French horns like… laterally the same, but they don’t run this joint, I run this joint. Queen, I guess? But then, _way_ in the fucking basement, we got tubas, and a step below them is trombones. It’s not simple steps in the levels here. We’re _so_ far above them.”

Junpei was in one of Akane’s liberal arts classes this semester. It was a weird course she did not yet remember the full name of, some kind of themed English class, with fewer than twenty students in the room.

“You can’t do this to me, Akane. You can’t date a trombone player,” Aoi begged. “Trumpets or French horns, that’s the only brass allowed in this household. God, date Carlos, please. Date Carlos.”

“ _You_ date Carlos! You talk about him every day!”

“Akane, he’s literally too good for me. He is a ray of goddamn sunshine and I’m, I’m a tar pit of sarcasm and bad choices.”

Despite the fuss he put up about it, he was content to linger with Clover after rehearsal and give Akane a chance to strike up a conversation with her target. Clover was not actually part of the orchestra. She just lived off-campus and by the time she got out of class at 5:30 on Mondays, all of her friends with cars had gone home, except for Alice and Aoi, and they were stuck in rehearsal until eight (or, in Alice’s case, had gone home after lunch because she did whatever she damn well pleased). Clover sat in the back of the hall, playing games on her phone until they got out, until the new conductor convinced her to join in on auxiliary percussion.

The new conductor was something special. It did not take long for the orchestra to realize this, but the realization came in pieces. He looked shy and awkward up on the stand, like someone who did not belong in the music building, let alone on the podium in front of an orchestra. Nona and Ennea were close enough to see the scars on his face that told of a life much more exciting than playing in orchestras.

He was a band guy originally, he said, with an apology to the strings. When Junpei called out to ask what he played, he gave a wink and a smile and replied with the motion of moving a trombone slide. He did not have all of the music picked out for the spring concert, only two of the usual three. On the whiteboard at the side of the rehearsal space, he had written the names of a few pieces he was considering, and he left out markers for everyone to vote.

There were a few tallies by the end of the rehearsal, but someone had written, just underneath _Danse Macabre_ , simply the word _pokemon_ , and that had garnered seven enthusiastic votes, much more than any of the others.

The new conductor saw it, placed his hands on his hips, and sniffed. “Well,” he said. “Pokeymon, huh?”

The next week, they had Pokémon music on their stands. Rhapsody in Red and Blue, it was called: a three-movement symphony dedicated to the music of the first generation of games.

“Found it on the internet, another college orchestra was playin’ it,” he said with a shrug. “Sent the guy an email askin’ if we could play it and he said sure. Sent over the music and gave some rehearsal tips. Nice kid.”

“We’re really playing Pokémon?” Quark asked, clutching the sheet music to his chest. “It’s really happening?!”

“It got seven votes,” replied the conductor with a shrug. “Ya gotta listen to seven.”

Somewhere along the way, that became a catchphrase—“gotta listen to seven”—and then that became his nickname.

Clover could not read music very well, but she had danced at enough clubs to know how to follow a beat. Every time they got to a new section, Phi would lay down the groove as an example for Clover to copy. Then Phi would go back to her mallets setup and wreak absolute havoc.

Usually in a percussion section, the best musician earns the role of timpanist. Their timing must be absolute, their aim perfect and brutal, and even their ear for pitch must be spot-on in order to master a mid-piece note change. This was not the case in Phi’s percussion section. To take her away from her mallets setup, where she could often also play up to two other auxiliary percussion parts if a shortage demanded it, would be a terrible mistake. Sigma was next in line to play the timpani after her, but he knew who was boss. She made sure he knew.

In most casual orchestras, and by comparison in even professional orchestras, the percussionists are the playful troublemakers. Sigma and Clover fit that bill to a tee, and Phi fit in alongside them just as well, until the baton started beating. Then her eyes gave it a death stare, and she held at least four mallets in her hands, dancing across the marimba like she was born knowing how to play this music.

The number of actually good players in this campus second-rate orchestra could be counted on one hand, and everyone else was mediocre at best. There was, of course, the virtuosic concertmaster, Delta, who made his ability seem like a frivolity and focused much more intently in his physics studies. Ennea and Nona were good violinists, but not _actually_ good, not in the way Delta was, or Phi or Alice. Then there was Luna, who could float through every register of the bassoon as if the keys did not make absolutely no sense, played long passages without needing a breath, and had an atomic sense of time even when the music gave her an unending stream of eighth notes. Seven called her the robot.

If Eric saw those players being counted out on one hand—Delta, Phi, Alice, Luna—he would put himself next, but he would probably be wrong. He was the next best player in the orchestra, without a doubt, but he was not of the same caliber as those four. He was more like Nona and Ennea, or Akane, or Carlos and Aoi: good, but not _actually_ good.

“Flute’s just the one thing he’s any good at,” Akane once said, completely earnestly, as a way of trying to empathize with his haughty air. As soon as he heard her, Junpei collapsed into laughter over the stack of chairs he had been pushing to the edge of the room after rehearsal.

“That was the coldest burn,” he snickered, “I have ever heard in my life. You stone-cold roasted that man. Holy shit.”

Eric bickered at with the other winds for their tuning almost every rehearsal. “You have to match me,” he said, even when he was the one bending slightly low. “It sounds worse if we don’t match each other, so just match me.”

The only times he did not say such things were the rehearsals where Alice was present. As soon as it looked like he wanted to say something, she would shoot him an icy glare. Everyone would be matching her pitch. The winds would match her, and the brass and strings would match the winds. She ran this orchestra.

During the five-minute break between pieces, Aoi leaned over Akane’s chair and muttered in her ear, “Don’t look now, but our dream boyfriends are going after each other.”

Carlos and Junpei had each had taken their mouthpieces out of their instruments and were articulating furiously into them. They scooted closer and closer together across the cleared bench of empty seats between third trombone and first trumpet, pointing at their lips and their mouthpieces before going at it again.

“He doesn’t know how to double-tongue,” Aoi groaned. “How can you like this guy? He doesn’t even know how to double-tongue. God, can I fake not knowing how to double-tongue? I want Carlos to show me how to double-tongue, Jesus.”

“Maybe he is faking it,” Akane wondered.

“Junpei? Stick-up-his-straight-ass Junpei?”

“Straight guys don’t usually stick anything up their asses.”

“Idiots. Don’t know what they’re missing.”

At the end of the third rehearsal, Seven told the percussionists to make sure the doors to the practice room were closed before he made an announcement. There was someone he wanted to invite to the ensemble, someone who needed a sense of community, but who was no longer allowed on campus after her expulsion three years ago. He said her name, and then he gave his email, and begged every member of the orchestra to tell him privately if her being there in secret would make them uncomfortable. One word and he would not invite her.

“Depends,” joked Dio from the back of cellos, leaning over the shoulder of his double bass. “What’s she play?”

Word got around that Mira was the girl from the seniors’ class who assaulted someone with a knife at a post-classes pre-finals party in the first semester of freshman year. Everyone made wary jokes about a knife-murderer joining their ensemble, but Seven did not get any email complaints.

She was pretty awful at the violin. Seven put her in the back of the seconds, and right in front of Eric.

After only a couple of weeks of that, Seven subtly decided to experiment with the layout of the strings. He had all of the violins on the outside edges of the inner semicircle of strings—essentially, he swapped the cellos and second violins. Dio complained that he would not be able to flirt with the cute cellists anymore. Diana’s freckled cheeks flamed red as she escaped to her new seat, while Sigma looked like he was going to break another timpani head.

Then Dio found himself quite easily flirting with Mira instead, and Eric looked like he was going to set fire to the room with the heat of the steam coming out of his head.

Seven put the strings back in their usual places the next week.

In a college orchestra, when a harp is needed for a piece, they typically hire a freelance player from the area for the last couple rehearsals and the concert. Once Aoi saw the young man wheeling in a harp, he could not take his eyes away. He watched as Clover snagged the chance to greet the gorgeous newcomer by bringing a chair and a music stand in the space between the first and second violins where he was to sit. With an urgent wave, Aoi beckoned her closer.

“That harp guy,” was all he could say. “Holy shit. I call dibs. You got Alice already, I call dibs.”

“Oh my _God_ , Aoi,” Clover giggled. “That’s my _brother_.”

Aoi’s brain stalled for only a second or two, and then he immediately asked, “Is he gay?”

“Uh, he’s twenty-five, he tucks in his shirt, and he plays the harp. And he’s related to me. Whaddya think?”

“ _God_ , please give me his number.”

“Ugh, get it yourself!”

Aoi refused to approach the beautiful harpist during the break. Carlos noticed—it was hard not to—his lustful stare and tried in vain to encourage him onward. Any other day, Aoi would have been Dying Inside™ to feel Carlos’s hand on his shoulder, but he was too busy holding his face in his hands and quietly screaming memes to himself as a coping mechanism for the actual feelings happening inside his chest.

After rehearsal, the harpist walked up to him. Aoi looked beside him, behind him, for something else the harpist could be heading towards, but there was nothing.

“I’m sorry that my sister neglected to mention that I have very good hearing,” he said.

Evidently Light Field was not too much of a goddamn ray of sunshine. He was well-spoken and had his life together, and was also extremely crass and down to get wasted on a Monday night.

“I _hate_ him,” Aoi moaned as Akane brought two filled water bottles to his bedroom the next morning. “He’s perfect and I fucking _hate_ him. I love him.”

The concert was one of those affairs where the low brass finally almost got their shit together on the day of the performance, and two separate string instruments had their bridges collapse during dress rehearsal like the impact of one had caused the other to react in sympathy, and Akane’s reed got a massive splinter in it. All par for the course.

When Akane came over to straighten out Junpei’s clip-on bowtie, she noticed that the cut and texture of his garments were not those of a tuxedo. “You’re just wearing a black suit,” she accused.

“I’m _not_ dropping two hundred bucks on something I’ll never wear after college and nobody can even see because I’m all the way at the back of the stage,” he complained.

“Your entire wardrobe is a disaster,” Akane sighed. “Let me take you shopping sometime. Please?”

Sean lent her one of his spare reeds, a thicker one than she liked, which made her squawk a little during a particularly exposed section. The entire strings section collaborated to unprofessionally set the bridges of the violin and viola back in place, since Seven had even less expertise in the area than they. But the audience screamed with applause after their Pokémon piece, and gave them a standing ovation after the finale, and everyone walked off stage with a smile.

The Kashiwabara twins’ mom met everyone backstage. They were only sophomores, but already Hazuki knew everyone’s names, and they were all on a first name basis with her. She invited everyone to celebrate at the local ice cream shop, and she would drive and pay for anyone who had no ride or money to go on.

Sigma bought a banana split for himself and Diana. Clover sat in Alice’s lap and dug her spoon into both of their sundaes. No one had ever seen Eric as happy as when he had a two-scoop cone of strawberry and cookie-dough ice cream in one hand and Mira’s hand in the other. At the peak of their rowdy takeover of the place, Aoi shoved his ice cream cone in Light’s face. Neither Junpei nor Akane felt hungry enough for ice cream, but they both thought a strawberry milkshake sounded nice, so they got one together, and smiled over their shared straw like they knew this was the beginning of something that would go beyond their time in the orchestra.

“Seven, hey, can you conduct this piece Phi and I are in for the student composer forum?” Sigma asked just as he and Hazuki were heading out the door. “It’s for marimba, flute, and dumbells.”

**Author's Note:**

> Things that are real: [Rhapsody in Red and Blue](https://soundcloud.com/icgso/04-rhapsody-in-red-and-blue-i?in=icgso/sets/gso-2013-spring-concert), an arrangement a friend of mine did for the inaugural year of my college's Gamer Symphony Orchestra, and [Free Weight Fantastique](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DB93_R9Ghg), an arrangement of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique featuring the real actual human man who taught me music history for two semesters and I still have to tell people about it because I can't fathom his existence.


End file.
